Well, there're no surprises here: cover adorning a rather vigorous individual intimidatingly yielding a long pike against a pitch-black background, and track titles hitting positive on three of the key flag-words, "Misanthropy" and "Darkness" (the remaining one being "Blasphemy"); definitely not something you'd casually listen to kick back when returning home from a long nine-hour shift at the office.

Nevertheless, the Finns here are well read in their chosen arts. They effectively utilise their negative predispositions and funnel them musically in an attention-grabbing manner. Their sometimes prominent, sometimes subtle Nordic influences are transparently inoculated with both the melancholic melodicism and percussive quasi-punkness of fellow countrymates Sargeist and Baptism. And on top of that, they have an exquisitely filthy production to boot. So you might ask what's missing then, what's wrong? Nothing necessarily. It's just that although _Sacrilegious Impalement_ is a fine cut of orthodox, meat-and-potatoes Finnish black metal, as it stands it remains yet another undifferentiated permutation of the same exhausted aesthetic prototype; nothing too bad about it, yet nothing too impressive either.